ReRooters Day, Provincetown Events

Visit your favorite Provincetown lodging establishment this January and come one, come all to Provincetown’s iconic, annual New Year’s celebration. Re-Rooters Day is one of the more unusual area events! Celebrated every January 7, Re-Rooters Day is a feel-good way to banish the stresses and excess of the Holiday Season, and welcome the New Year.

Jay Critchley, Provincetown artist and comedic philanthropist, started this curious tradition in 1983. In its most basic definition, the event is a way to say goodbye to the old year, welcome the New Year, and re-root yourself to the earth, and to life.

However, a more vivid definition would include words like release, bizarre, and wildly healing.

If you attend this small but heartfelt event, you might see sights such as a man (Jay Critchley) parading about in an over-the-top costume (waterproof), an ex-Christmas Tree being stuffed with papers and items containing those things people want to rid themselves of, singing of songs, seemingly meaningless orations, and finally Mr. Critchley sending the aforementioned Christmas Tree out to sea – set ablaze.

In a way, it is a sort of late New Years Eve celebration – people gather to socialize and have fun while ridding themselves of the old and bringing in the new, complete with so-called resolutions, symbolized by those things going into the tree.

Attendees believe that this is the perfect way to have a fresh start to the year by ridding themselves of cares and concerns – watching them burn up and float away.

January 7, 2012 will be the 29th Annual Re-Rooters Day, held on the East End Flats at sunset. The actual location is a secret, but you may be able to stumble upon the event if you happen to be out and about! Find it, and join Jay and those attendees brave enough to shirk the weather to celebrate the New Year in P-Town fashion. Cocoa and a warm fire will await you at your favorite Cape Cod bed and breakfast when you return!